Consumers have an ever-increasing array of options for consuming media content, in terms of the types of media content (e.g., video, audio, text, etc.), providers of the media content, and devices for consuming the media content. Media content providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and effective at optimizing the quality of the media content provided.
Live streaming media content includes channels or feeds with live events (e.g., real-time or near real-time sporting events, news, concerts, etc.) or scheduled broadcasts of pre-recorded content. Media content encoded with variable average bit rates or variable fragment lengths have variable fragment sizes. Thus, fragment sizes generated by variable bit rate or variable fragment length encoders cannot be predicted in advance for ongoing live event media content.
Unfortunately, updates of manifest data to provide newly encoded fragment sizes for quality optimization algorithms complicate infrastructure requirements and increase cost of delivery.